What Is EMDR Therapy and What Actually Happens in a Session?

If you’ve been told EMDR might help you, or you’ve heard the name and gone down a rabbit hole trying to figure out what it actually is, you’re not the only one. It’s one of those treatments that gets recommended frequently and explained poorly. “Eye movements” sounds strange. “Reprocessing” sounds vague. Most descriptions either oversimplify it or make it sound more mystical than it is.

So here’s a straightforward account of what EMDR is, where it came from, and what you’d actually experience in a session.

Where EMDR came from

EMDR was developed by a psychologist named Francine Shapiro in 1987. The origin story is genuinely worth knowing, because it shaped everything about how the therapy works.

Shapiro was walking through a park, thinking through some of her own distressing memories, when she noticed something: as her eyes moved back and forth naturally while she walked, the intensity of those memories seemed to decrease. The thoughts were still there, but they didn’t feel as charged. She started investigating whether that effect could be deliberately replicated, and eventually built it into a structured therapeutic approach.

That bilateral movement, the back-and-forth stimulation, is still central to how EMDR works. Though it’s worth saying: eye movements are just one option. Therapists also use alternating taps or sounds. The modality matters less than the rhythm.

What EMDR is actually doing

When something difficult happens, the brain doesn’t always file it away cleanly. Traumatic or highly distressing experiences can get stored in a fragmented way, with the emotional charge still very much intact. So years later, something small, a tone of voice, a particular smell, a look from your boss, can activate a response that feels disproportionate to what’s actually happening. Your nervous system is responding to then, not now.

EMDR works by helping the brain reprocess those stored memories so they lose that charge. The goal isn’t to erase what happened. It’s to help your brain file the memory as something that occurred in the past, rather than something that’s still happening. Over time, the memory becomes less intrusive. The beliefs that formed around it, things like “I’m not safe” or “I’m not enough,” start to loosen.

What the process actually looks like

EMDR follows an eight-phase protocol, which sounds more rigid than it is in practice. A good therapist moves through it responsively, not mechanically. Here’s what each phase involves:

History taking. The therapist gets to know you, what brought you in, what your goals are, and starts building a picture of what experiences might be worth targeting. This usually takes a few sessions.

Preparation. Before any reprocessing happens, the therapist helps you build the capacity to tolerate it. That might mean learning grounding techniques or ways to regulate when emotions get intense. This phase gets skipped over in a lot of descriptions of EMDR, but it matters enormously. Jumping into reprocessing before someone is ready tends to go badly. Some people spend quite a few sessions here, and that’s not a problem.

Assessment. This is a shorter phase that sets up the specific memory you’re going to work with. The therapist asks you about the memory, what negative belief about yourself comes up when you think of it, how intense it feels in your body, and what you’d rather believe about yourself instead.

Desensitization. This is the core of the work. The therapist guides you to hold the distressing memory in mind while administering bilateral stimulation — eye movements, taps, or sounds. Your brain starts to move through the material. Sometimes that looks like other memories surfacing, physical sensations, or emotions you weren’t expecting. The therapist checks in periodically and helps you stay with the process when it gets stuck.

Installation. Once the memory has lost most of its charge, the therapist helps you reinforce the positive belief you identified earlier. So “I’m not enough” becomes something more accurate, something that actually fits. This gets paired with the memory, so the two are linked.

Body scan. The therapist asks you to notice your body as you think about the memory. If there’s still emotional residue showing up physically, the desensitization continues.

Closure. Every session ends with grounding, especially if the processing isn’t complete. You don’t leave sessions activated and unmoored.

Reevaluation. The next session opens by checking in on where things landed. If there’s more to process, you pick up from phase four.

A few things people don’t expect

EMDR can feel slow in the early phases. A lot of people come in wanting to get straight to the reprocessing and spend several sessions just in preparation. But therapists need to make sure the work is going to hold.

It also isn’t always emotionally intense in the way people anticipate. Some sessions are quiet and almost meditative. Others bring up more. It varies by person and by memory.

And it doesn’t require you to talk through every detail of what happened. For people who have spent years avoiding their history because talking about it directly feels like too much, that can be a meaningful difference.

Working with our practice

Our clinicians work with EMDR across a range of presentations, like complex trauma, childhood experiences, anxiety that doesn’t have an obvious source, or relationship patterns that keep repeating. If you’ve been wondering whether it might be a fit for what you’re navigating, a consultation is a good place to start.

You don’t need to have everything figured out before reaching out. That’s what the first conversation is for.